''Grey Zone'' revisits grim territory

The Grey Zone (Holocaust drama, color, no rating, 1:48)

By Todd McCarthy, Daily Variety Chief Film Critic

TORONTO (Variety) - At once brutally realistic and highly theatrical, Tim
Blake Nelson's screen
version of his play ``The Grey Zone'' may well evoke the mechanized horror
in the bowels of the Nazi
death camps more vividly than any fictional film to date.

But its staccato, Mamet-style dialogue exchanges, breathless pacing and
remarkably healthy,
well-fed-looking actors create a cumulative sense of artificiality that
seriously undercuts the devastating
effect clearly being sought in this fictionalized dramatization of the
only organized uprising ever
attempted by the prisoners at Auschwitz.

Laudably avoiding cheap sentimentality and phony heroics in its aggressive
investigation of an
all-but-impossible moral quandary, this is a relentless, hard-edged,
tough-minded picture that, even
with supportive reviews, faces an uphill commercial struggle upon planned
release by Lions Gate next
spring.

Resisting any ``Hollywood'' impulse to provide uplift, fourth feature by
Nelson (``Eye of God,''
``Kansas,'' the current ``O'') centers upon the Sonderkommandos, Jews who
helped prepare their
fellow prisoners for the gas chamber and then ``processed'' their remains
afterward; in exchange for
their cooperation with the Nazis, members of these ``special squads'' were
given privileges and
immeasurably better living conditions than the norm, although they knew
that they, too, would follow in
their doomed comrades' footsteps within four months at most.

Out of this wrenching and fundamentally hopeless dilemma arises the pivot
of the story -- the only
known concentration camp prisoners' revolt, on Oct. 7, 1944. Essentially
framing the dramatic
argument are two points of view -- that of Dr. Nyiszli (Allan Corduner), a
brilliant, fastidious Jew
whose pact with the devil has him working on medical experiments with the
notorious Dr. Mengele and
who believes that ``We're all just trying to make it to the next day,''
and that of Nazi Oberschaarfher
Erich Muhsfeldt (Harvey Keitel), the blunt and dissolute crematorium
overseer who despises the Jews
for being such ``easy'' and willing victims.

With a low industrial hum churning ominously in the background as the gas
chambers and ovens
relentlessly mete out oblivion, a number of the mostly Hungarian prisoners
in Auschwitz II-Birkenau
argue over their planned revolt. These are not the meek, sheeplike inmates
of many Holocaust
pictures, but feisty, combative men who know their fates but believe they
might be able to take part of
the Third Reich down with them. To this end, makeshift weapons, a few guns
and some gunpowder
smuggled in by some women (Natasha Lyonne, Mira Sorvino) at a nearby
munitions factory are being
amassed, although there is much to-and-fro about goals, tactics, timing
and so on.

Meanwhile, the 12th Sonderkommando, which includes Hoffman (David
Arquette), Abramowics
(Steve Buscemi), Rosenthal (David Chandler, who appeared in the stage
production) and Schlermer
(Daniel Benzali), goes about its grisly task of jamming prisoners into the
death chambers, shoveling the
corpses into ovens and disposing of the ashes. Obviously desensitized to
an almost inhuman degree by
his work, Hoffman is nonetheless stirred when a 14-year-old girl is found
to have miraculously
survived the gassing; he hides her from the Nazis, and her presence both
complicates and inspires the
rebellion that the prisoners are plotting.

The setting and situation are intrinsically compelling, to be sure, and
visually the emphasis is on intense
realism; working in near-full-sized replicas of sections of the camp on
location in Bulgaria, Nelson and
lenser Russell Lee Fine aggressively push the camera to the very depths of
this hell on Earth, into the
barracks, anterooms, gas chambers, ovens, graves and prison yards where
executions for infractions
were regularly carried out.

There are also various macabre and ironic touches -- classical music being
played by prisoners to
``welcome'' fresh arrivals, an enraged Hoffman beating an upstart newcomer
to death despite the
Sonderkommandos' proud self-distinction of doing no actual killing, the
arrival of Allied bombers
overhead merely inspiring the Nazis to set a faster schedule for killing
Jews. As for the rebellion itself,
it's a briefly rousing but ultimately sorry affair with a grim aftermath.

The use of American accents for the Hungarians and German inflections for
the Nazis works plausibly
enough, but Nelson's dialogue is predominantly composed of short sentences
spat out with speed and
precision; conversational tones and underlying thought processes don't
exist. Effect of verbal unreality
is augmented by the generally hyper-active mode of the thesping, although
on a case-by-case basis the
actors -- notably Arquette in an unusually dramatic role, Buscemi as a
professional cynic and Keitel
(who also came onboard as an exec producer) as the bloated, thoroughly
jaded crematorium overseer
-- do solid, intense work. The character of Dr. Nyiszli, on whose memoirs
the play and script are
partly based, stands apart for his meticulous demeanor and reasoned
behavior under enormous
pressure, and Corduner commandingly portrays him as if he were acting in a
particularly corrosive
Harold Pinter play.